Passover in the Confederacy

For at least one night each spring during the Civil War, in places like Louisiana and South Carolina and Georgia and Virginia, Confederate Jews commemorated how God freed the children of Israel from slavery. They retold the story of when God is said to have sent down 10 plagues to help free the Hebrews from their bondage, the last of which was the slaying of all Egyptians’ firstborn children, and how the Jews marked their door posts with the blood of a slaughtered lamb so the Angel of Death would know to “pass over” them. Thus, they celebrated their liberation more than 3,000 years ago from slavery in ancient Egypt, and their exodus.

Some of those commemorating Passover may have gathered with their families around a dinner table partaking in a Seder — possibly served by slaves. Many others were on the battlefield, holding impromptu Seders or simply noting the special night for a moment in their minds as they focused on fighting for their home states — Southern slave states.

For many American Jews today, particularly those descended from immigrants coming through Northeast corridors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea that Confederate Jews fought on the side of slavery offends their entire worldview, rooted so deeply in social justice. Even the idea of there being so many Jews in the American South, decades before Ellis Island opened its gates, is a strange idea.

But just as Robert E. Lee, an Army officer for 32 years, sided with his home state of Virginia against the federal government, many Jews found a homeland in Dixie over the centuries and decided they could not take up arms against it. To them, after all they’d suffered and fled throughout the ages, the South was their new motherland, the land of milk and honey (and cotton), and it was worth fighting for. “This land has been good to all of us,” one Jewish-German Southerner wrote. “I shall fight to my last breath.”

Hailing first from Spain and Portugal as early as 1695, then later from England, Germany and the Caribbean islands, and even later from Poland, Hungary and Russia, one-fifth of all United States Jews settled in the South before the 20th century. In 1800, Charleston, S.C. — whose 1790 state constitution guaranteed freedom of religion — was home to the largest Jewish community in America; by 1861, a third of all Jews in the South resided in Louisiana.

These Jews arrived fleeing tyrannical governments and centuries of expulsion, massacres and all manner of restrictions on personal liberty. Coming to America and finding Dixie — where they were respected as citizens and allowed to vote, own property and live as they chose — was a blessing. They set up as peddlers and shop owners, artisans and innkeepers, shoemakers and tailors, salesmen and farmers. Some became businessmen and bankers, lawyers and physicians.

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Judah Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of stateCredit Library of Congress

Others became politicians, some quite prominent. At the start of the war, Judah P. Benjamin was one of Louisiana’s senators, and the second senator of Jewish descent in American history (after David Yulee of Florida); he became the Confederacy’s attorney general and chief of espionage operations, and later secretary of war and secretary of state. In the waning days of the Confederacy, he argued for freeing the slaves to enlist them to fight for the South. Benjamin’s cousin, Henry M. Hyams, served as Louisiana’s lieutenant governor during the war. After the war Benjamin Franklin Jonas, a former Confederate soldier, became the third Jew in the Senate.

Jews left their mark on the South in other ways. A Jew named Manasseh was a popular innkeeper in the 1700s in Virginia, and he is believed to have been immortalized in the name of his location, Manasseh’s Gap — known now as simply the famous Manassas, the site of the first major battle of the war. Moses Ezekiel, a Richmond-born Jew and highly decorated Confederate soldier, later became the world-renowned sculptor who crafted the ornate Confederate Monument that graces Jackson Circle at Arlington National Cemetery. He is buried there, among his fellow rebels, under the inscription “in simple obedience to duty as they understood it.” In all, approximately 3,000 first-, second- and third-generation American Jews fought for the Confederacy. (About 7,000 fought for the Union.)

While the South, like everywhere else, did exhibit anti-Semitism, many Southern Jews felt the North was more deeply anti-Semitic. Popular Northern newspapers denigrated Jews; Harper’s Weekly said that all Jews were secessionists, copperheads and rebels. Other papers blamed the Jews for destroying the national credit. Union general Ulysses S. Grant exhibited the greatest bigotry of all when he issued General Orders No. 11 in December 1862, “the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all of American history,” according to Rabbi Bertram W. Korn. The orders called for the expulsion of all Jews within 24 hours from Grant’s territory at the time, which included parts of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi.

Grant and his men believed Jews were solely responsible for the common practice of illegal trade with the enemy – a forbidden but economically necessary practice. Some Jews did engage in such illicit commerce, but so did a lot of people on both sides. To add to the offensiveness of the order, Union soldiers forced Jews from their homes, confiscated their possessions, denied them rail transportation even as they were being evicted from their towns, revoked trade licenses and imprisoned them. A few weeks later, when Lincoln found out about the order, he revoked it — “I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners,” he said.

In the South, Jews lived as everyone lived, and many Southern Jews accepted – alongside their co-regionalists – the institution of slavery. “Jews in America are very much a part of the American political landscape of their time; they’re not necessarily different,” says Lance J. Sussman, the senior rabbi at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, Pa., and a visiting professor of American Jewish history at Princeton. “They are often chameleon-like. Southern Jews and many Northern Jews had no issue with slavery.”

That said, Jewish opinions on slavery were not exclusively regional. New York’s Morris Raphall, the leading American rabbi of the period, shocked many Jews and non-Jews by defending slavery on biblical grounds, saying in 1861 that “slavery has existed since earliest times,” that “slaveholding is no sin,” that “slave property is expressly placed under the protection of the Ten Commandments” and that the reason Africans were slaves in America was because that’s what God wanted for them. In contrast, Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore — in the slave state of Maryland — argued against every one of Raphall’s biblical claims. (His congregants did not agree, and he was forced to flee to Philadelphia.)

And like many Southerners, Confederate Jews who joined the rebel army did so for a number of reasons. “Most Jewish Johnny Rebs, like their fellow countrymen, believed they were fighting for their own liberty and in defense of their homes,” wrote Robert Rosen in his book “The Jewish Confederates.” At the same time, a strong element in the decision to fight for the Confederacy was simply that everyone else around them was doing it. Records show that 75 to 85 percent of all young white males in the South served in the military.

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Still, the idea of Jews fighting or rooting for the South is bewildering to many Jews today, especially those descended from Russian Socialists who came to America with ideas of class and economic equality and who identified with blacks and other excluded groups. According to Rabbi Sussman, the Civil War was the turning point for Jews in coming to see that slavery was wrong and based in racism, and the experience put the modern American Jew on a path of advocating for and supporting civil rights and empowerment for all people. “For thousands of years of history, nobody believed that valuing a human being as a commodity was inherently wrong,” he said.

The Passover narrative, he adds, didn’t become an abolitionist-related story until after World War II and the Civil Rights era. “Originally, Passover was theological. It’s about redemption and the power of God. It’s not really about setting human beings free in a universal way. The text says that God frees the Hebrew slaves because God loves the Hebrews. God doesn’t free all slaves for all of humanity or send Moses out to become the William Lloyd Garrison of the ancient free world.”

In viewing the past from the mind-set of the present, I couldn’t help wondering whether some Jewish Johnny Rebs believed another Jewish holiday — Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement — was their redemption for fighting on the wrong side of history. On Yom Kippur, Jews typically spend the day fasting, engaged in prayer, asking God and fellow man for forgiveness for wrongs they committed against them. But I’m probably wrong. According to Rabbi Sussman, the Jewish Confederates “felt they had nothing to atone for. In terms of the hierarchy of values in the modern world, antebellum southern Jews prioritized their beliefs the way everyone else around them did and rallied to their flag.”

On Aug. 23, 1861, Rabbi Max Michelbacher of Richmond, Va., who wrote a “Prayer for the Confederacy,” which was distributed to all Jewish Confederate soldiers, asked General Lee to grant a furlough for the Jewish soldiers to attend synagogue for the High Holy Days. Because of the exigencies of war, Lee declined, but his response to Michelbacher eloquently illustrates the way that ecumenical regionalism overshadowed any sense of religious difference between the two men: “I feel assured that neither you or any member of the Jewish congregation would wish to jeopardize a cause you have so much at heart.” In closing, he added: “That your prayers for the success & welfare of our Cause may be granted by the Great Ruler of the universe is my ardent wish.”

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.